In Dupage, It's Politic To Switch

Democrats Move In With The Majority

August 25, 1996|By William Grady, Tribune Staff Writer.

The 1970s were heady days for the Democratic Party in DuPage County.

Democrats held four seats on the DuPage County Board as well as an occasional township office in the northeast corner of the county. And in 1978, then-President Jimmy Carter spent the night in DuPage, at the home of an Elmhurst friend.

Don't expect any visits to DuPage this week, though, when President Clinton comes to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention.

It's true that several of the politicians who considered themselves Democrats in the 1970s or '80s hold elected office in DuPage. But they now are Republicans, having switched allegiances over the years to join up with the party that traditionally has dominated local politics in the county.

Though DuPage has the largest pocket of Democratic voters in Illinois outside of Chicago--the result in part of suburban growth that has doubled its population since the mid-1960s--the county's Democratic Party has had little success at the local level.

With its relatively high income level and low minority population, DuPage is as much a bastion of suburban Republicanism as Orange County in metropolitan Los Angeles and Westchester County near New York.

"The Republican Party in DuPage enjoys a professional advantage, starting with demographics," said County Board member Roger Kotecki (R-Glen Ellyn), who twice has won election as a Republican after running unsuccessfully for the board in 1988 as a Democrat.

"Wealthier suburban counties are heavily Republican, and DuPage is one of the wealthier suburban counties in the country."

Kotecki also points to the GOP's long tradition of success.

"People believe Democrats can't win, so why bother giving them money or campaigning for them or even voting for them?" he said. "It becomes extremely difficult if you want to become involved in a partisan office."

So why haven't Democrats captured the votes of the wave of newcomers who have fueled the county's population growth?

Kotecki says many of those who moved from Chicago for havens in DuPage were already Republicans or leaning that way.

"A number of people probably would have been Republicans in the city if it had been practical to be one there," he said. "Not everyone who moved out from the city was a true-blue Democrat."

It is not unusual, though, in U.S. politics for public figures to switch parties.

Veteran U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C) was a Democrat who left his party in the mid-1960s. More recent examples include Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), an unsuccessful GOP presidential hopeful, and Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.), who jumped to the Republican Party last year.

In his 1971 book "Boss," Tribune columnist Mike Royko wrote that the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley won his first election, to the state House in 1936, as a Republican write-in candidate. Daley, though, already had been active in Democratic politics at the time and quickly switched back to the other side of the aisle.

Alan Gitelson, a political science professor at Loyola University in Chicago, says some politicians make the jump because the other party more closely aligns with their personal ideologies. Others do it for reasons of political expedience--to win election in a community or area dominated by one party or another. Often, both reasons figure into the decision.

State Rep. Robert Biggins (R-Elmhurst) was a Democrat in 1973, when he won election as assessor in Addison Township. He had been raised in Franklin Park and describes his parents as "Kennedy Democrats."

His victory came during what appeared to be a window of opportunity for the Democratic Party in DuPage.

Donald Carroll had won election to County Board as a Democrat in 1972, the first since the Depression era, and three other Democrats won board seats in the post-Watergate election of 1974.

Carroll is now an Addison Township GOP precinct committeeman in Bensenville. And there have been no Democrats on the DuPage County Board since one of the other three, Jane Spirgel, of Elmhurst, declined to seek re-election in 1986.

Biggins served one term as a assessor before he was defeated for re-election when he again ran as a Democrat. He says he had worked with Republicans as assessor and drifted toward the GOP, quietly voting in Republican primaries but never thinking he would run again for elected office.

In 1977, the Democratic ticket for township office in Addison included DuPage County Board member William Maio Jr. (R-Itasca). Maio had been raised in the Democratic steel-mill neighborhoods of Chicago's Southeast Side.

Though he was interested in politics and had worked for Democrats when he was younger, Maio was less enthusiastic about the party after he returned from the military, moved to DuPage and went into business for himself.

"The more I learned about the Democratic Party, the less I had in common," Maio said.

He had agreed to run with Biggins, unsuccessfully as it turned out, but Maio says he already "was a Republican at heart."

Unlike Maio, Kotecki grew up in DuPage, in a family that was involved in community activities but not partisan politics.

Campaigning as a Democrat in 1988, Kotecki ran better in his district than the party's presidential candidate that year, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.

The 24 DuPage County Board members are elected from six four-member districts. The districts are large enough to effectively dilute whatever pockets of Democratic strength exist in the county.

After a failed petition drive in an attempt to force a referendum on single-member board districts, Kotecki says he concluded that the Democratic Party in DuPage was not capable of helping itself.